And what's the problem with that ? Obviously emergency and defense sectors have uses for this technology. Firemen and police were the reason this was developed in the first place.
Exactly. Just like Bit Torrent has legitimate uses and should not be discounted entirely, the fact that this sees through walls is of great use to emergency responders. Sure they can be used for pirating porn or clandestine operations, respectively, but it would be silly to condemn the technology itself for that reason.
The energy of the collisions at the LHC is higher, plain and simple. You need higher energies to explore certain types of physics, and the best way to increase energy is with a larger collider. The size is a function of the desired energy, not the goal itself.
been playing multiplayer games for 15 years now.. I haven't had to pay the publisher anything bu the $50 or so for the game itself.. no no, the real issue is that they want MORE...and they want to retain control of the product after you buy it.
Given that the game is 'freemium' (free to play, better if you pay), that argument doesn't hold for BFH (they obviously need people to pay to make the same $50/person). It does hold true for MW2, though, at $60 with only Infinity Ward-provided matchmaking.
What right does an access provider have to block legal access by their customers. By what argument are their customers *not* being deprived of they kind of access for which they are paying? This is as much a question of user perception as local legal technicalities, but it sounds like Optus has been thinking in terms of the latter.
Seems like a good example of why net neutrality regulations need to extend to mobile developers. "Oh, you can download applications, but if you spend money on them we want a cut". Sorry buddy, I'm already paying you for service, deal with it.
This is key, really on the PC the best option would've been to include an XBox live style setup so you can select a player as a player you wish to avoid in future. What happens then is when you start matchmaking it wont matchmake you with these players. If people cheat they will soon find a lack of people playing with them. If the feedback is sent to IW, then it'd be a good indicator for who to check for cheating to give account bans too as well, if someone has 500 players blacklisting them then it'd suggest there's probably something there to check out.
XBox Live ratings (avoid/prefer) do not affect ranked matchmaking (to prevent people from just avoiding the better players). This is also ranked matchmaking, so I doubt they would let you avoid. The avoid is meant for annoying players, rather than those who should get banned.
However, there is the option to report those who are cheating or otherwise breaking the terms of service. That's the way players get identified for bans.
Infinity Ward isn't running any servers. They may be running matchmaker servers (or perhaps Steam is providing that part of the service too) but not the actual systems the game is hosted on.
So there's not really any way for Infinity Ward to swiftly deal with cheaters in the game. The only way cheaters will be swiftly dealt with on listen servers is via player kick votes.
And how players themselves will manage to keep cheaters permanently out of their games until a VAC ban kicks in, well I don't know if that's even possible in a practical way. So I'd fully expect that even if a cheater gets kicked out of a game he'll just hop into another one, and I also expect you might run into him in other games until such time as the VAC banhammer hits him.
Infinity Ward's removal of cheaters from games will be limited to cheaters detected and banned via VAC2.
That's what I meant to say. IW says who gets to play, and they're the only ones who can. A private group of players can no longer create a clean community and ban cheaters, griefers, bigots, and other undesirables.
I was under the impression that players themselves were limited as to how much they could do against cheaters. I thought there was no vote kick (though I don't have the game to check) because otherwise players would vote kick players better than themselves. But yes, there's still a lag, and any new cheater in your server will cause nothing but problems until they decide to leave.
But Punkbuster has its own issues. Many players were not able to play on Punkbuster-enabled servers in CoD4 because some driver or other bit of code caused an incompatibility.
Really, any anti-cheat will eventually be defeatable. The bigger issue is that since IW is running all the servers you have to depend on them to remove any cheaters, rather than being able to play on a server with a good team of admins keeping them away. It's possible IW will do an even better job of this, but I think it's that choice that people want.
The ice part is water ice. You need a supply of water.
Read it again.
Aluminum is plentiful anywhere we intend to go.
The most likely reason we want to go somewhere long enough term to consider creating new rocket fuel on location will need water (or copious oxygen, hydrogen, and energy) already to support long-term human inhabitants. So, obviously, the limiting factor is just Aluminum, which is also plentiful.
I don't give a rat's arse about this or that game, and I'm a little annoyed about the idea of tax payer's money being wasted on non-crimes such as this.
Better to prosecute them for a crime that doesn't concern you before they move onto crimes that do target you. Stop them while they're still phishing Runescape accounts, instead of e-mails, bank accounts, or credit cards.
I'm sure you will appreciate that taxpayer money is used to pursue criminal charges when someone steals your [insert thing that nobody else but you cases about here].
What makes you think that every sailor aboard the ship would have access to the weapons at all times?
What makes you think a foreign country will care? It's still a group of foreigners with weapons which may or may not be legal to posess in the country. If you're lucky, the officials might take a bribe to look the other way, but imagine in the UK if a docked ship had a stash of weapons. I doubt they would just assume the best and let them on their merry way.
As another poster mentioned, though, it's quite likely that NG came back and said here's a system that will do that, and it will cost X, and the customer got sticker shock and decided to drop a few 9s from the SLA. I'm in that business, and this happens all the time.
That sounds about right, expecially after reading this quote:
George F. Coulter took over as the state's chief information officer in August.
"The first thing I noticed was that the network that Northrop Grumman rolled out didn't have redundancy, backup," Coulter said yesterday. "The contract does not call for redundancy in carriers . . . in the network.
"Why that wasn't put into the network, I don't know," Coulter said. "This is a service we have to have."
My guess is that the VA employees overseeing the bidding and proposal writeup did not understand the importance. They probably wanted somewhere to cut costs, saw the word 'redundant', and thought that would be a good place to save money. Without someone technical with enough weight to tell the higher-ups that this is a necessity, some manager will decide to kill that part of the proposal, thinking they saved the state millions. Presuming the last CIO and his team didn't know what they were doing (likely because the person who appointed them didn't know how to tell), this seems believeable to me.
Exactly, I don't see 'some retailers will quote you a higher price', I only see 'one retailers quoted a higher price, and it was fixed after it was noticed'.
I won't rule out that others are doing this, but I'm going to need a few more examples before I think of this as anything more than an isolated incident.
Living in the area, I can tell you VA has definitely been having budget issues. It's also an election year, and the only thing voters wanted their money spent on is roads (one NPR call-in show took about 10 calls for an official, all about the road budget). Put 2 and 2 together, and there's no room in the budget for 'fluff' like a redundant network.
As a clarification, they did not boot you off of Live, they booted the console off of Live. You still have a subscription, your modified hardware just can't use it. Your subscription will still work on a legitimate device.
I see. And if you unmod your hardware, will it let you back on? Didn't think so.
That would be another unauthorized modification, which is against the TOS;-) Of course, the console can't connect to XBL, meaning Microsoft can't turn your box back on anyway.
I don't understand an analogy where XBox -> being alive. Perhaps better is that MS sold you a car and licensed the radio and guages under a TOS. If you violate those terms, they remove your access to these parts. You can still drive the car, though the best part of the functionality might be missing.
Being paid a reasonable wage for a reasonable amount of work is one thing, being paid huge amounts of money for work you haven't even done recently is quite another.
Software companies make millions off the hard work of their programmers, and they don't get an ongoing percentage of sales. If that programmer leaves, they stop getting anything at all but the company continues to make millions from the work they did.
Congratulations, that's the difference between being an entrepenour/business owner/actor/recording artist and a salaried or hourly laborer. The first group takes the lions share of the risk of failure in exchange for recurring profits from sales. The second group takes minimal risk with a guarantee of money paid for services rendered, regardless of future results.
You don't get celebrity programmers for the same reason you don't get celebrity brick layers. Instead you get celebrity software designers (Will Wright, Tim Shaffer) or architects (Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry). While a skilled laborer can ruin a project if they don't perform well, only the designer can make a project succeed. It doesn't matter haw straight the brickwork is or how fast the GUI operates: if the building/program is designed like shit, nobody cares.
The problem is that you need 1.6 acts per week to get that and that it takes more then 20 hours of practice to be performance ready. You're also not counting equipment which is per person A$1500 for a cheap performance grade guitar and A$1000 for a cheap performance grade amplifier.
And guitarists can get by relatively cheap. Bassists have instruments that are roughly as expensive, though their amps cost more, and strings considerably more so ($10-15 for 6 guitar strings, $30-40 for 4 bass strings) which are usually replaced before every performance. Drummers get it even worse, they might manage to get by with $3000 worth of drums.
The point I was trying to make is that the people who play local gigs and teach music locally do it because they love to do it (much like OSS dev's) but the music industry only attracts those who want money, not the love of music. OK a bit OTT but tell me it's not true.
Actually, many 'recording artists' love making music, and a record label is usually the only way they can manage to do music full time. I'm willing to bet you that >95% of major recording artists started for the love of what they were doing and just wanted to get their music heard. Once they got their first big check, though, they were addicted to big money.
If they just wanted money, they probably would have looked into something less demanding than music. Just like your average corporate programmer likes writing code, they wanted a way to make a living doing it. It's not that they don't like what they do, only that working for a business is the easiest (and most secure) way to earn a living.
Pluto is a planet, it's just one of 5 dwarf planets. So yes, to be completely accurate, they'd either need to ditch Pluto or add Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.
All that said, I'm guessing 'ET' woouldn't give two shits about the dwarf planets. He'd see the gas giants, and maybe our 4 inner planets. If they looked really close, they might see some assorted rocky and icy belts, but nothing worth mentioning compared to the other planets.
Of course, part of the idea of dwarf planets is to make them open ended, so you don't need to memorize all of them. The analogy is to mountains: there are lots of mountains, people don't memorize them all, but they're still given special recognition.
Unless, of course, there are non-serviceable parts that are degrading. In other words, verifying that our weapons are able to be fixed for the forseeable future.
For example, if the fissile material or shape charges degrade, you're not going to go about replacing them. You'd just buld new ones, and in that case might as well design a better one from scratch.
Perhaps. But the kicker here is that the Xbox 360 is unable to be used on any other network. Microsoft has taken key steps to ensure that 360s cannot be used over VPNs or any other network other than a local LAN. Individual 360s pass encrypted keys to one another upon first connection and if they do not receive an appropriate replay in 30ms, a connection is not made. It was a blatant attempt to disable alternative services like Xlink Kai and completely lock down online play on the console.
We are dealing with a Walled Garden here. Microsoft is exerting complete control over 360 consoles regardless of who owns them. If it were possible to connect to VPNs like Xlink Kai or others, this ban would be a problem. But it's not. Microsoft sold these guys a console which they said could be used to play online games, and now these console can't be used to so much as send a private message.
Isn't that kind of the point? You buy into the entire system, both their hardware and their network are linked. If you don't like it, nobody's forcing you to enter their walled garden. The Xbox isn't a monopoly (where this argument might hold water), play your games on PC or a different console.
And failed to refund upto 2 years of Xbox Live subscription, or refund dollars for games that no longer work without the online connection.
As a clarification, they did not boot you off of Live, they booted the console off of Live. You still have a subscription, your modified hardware just can't use it. Your subscription will still work on a legitimate device.
Even people who are just trying to use it to run some basic necessities.
Why does the final use of the power matter when charging for it? The power plant and grid are use agnostic. A KWH is a KWH and is just as expensive to deliver whether it powers a massage chair or a insulin pump.
I do support tiered usage -- first 500KWH for the month at one rate, the rest at a higher rate but that doesn't really correlate with usage. I use the median amount of power for my area but a huge proportion goes to technological gizmos and very little to necessities.
The state has a vested interest in ensuring that those on tight budgets needing electricity for basics are notpaying a premium due to excessive luxury use. The power company doesn't care, but that's why we have a government to step in on occasion. Obviously tiered systems are the simpler (and more direct) method of fixing this, rather than doing hunt-and-peck to reduce individual power-hungry devices. Not only does this allow low-use customers to afford electricity while still providing the same overall profit margin, with the added benefit of being a motivation to reduce energy usage for the bigger consumers (and therefor reduce the rolling blackout issue).
Of course, this is a much larger issue in places like Michigan, where cutting off someone's power can kill them (and yes, he was preparing to pay his bill). So yes, the government probably should think it matters what the power is used for.
Obviously I was somewhat misinformed. I would still say there is plenty of blame to go around, rather than the typical easy route of 'blame the federal government'. Every level of government broke down a bit here.
That said, please mod my GP post down, as what I said is obviously not accurate.
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And what's the problem with that ? Obviously emergency and defense sectors have uses for this technology. Firemen and police were the reason this was developed in the first place.
Exactly. Just like Bit Torrent has legitimate uses and should not be discounted entirely, the fact that this sees through walls is of great use to emergency responders. Sure they can be used for pirating porn or clandestine operations, respectively, but it would be silly to condemn the technology itself for that reason.
The energy of the collisions at the LHC is higher, plain and simple. You need higher energies to explore certain types of physics, and the best way to increase energy is with a larger collider. The size is a function of the desired energy, not the goal itself.
And Lead. Don't forget about ALICE.
been playing multiplayer games for 15 years now.. I haven't had to pay the publisher anything bu the $50 or so for the game itself.. no no, the real issue is that they want MORE...and they want to retain control of the product after you buy it.
Given that the game is 'freemium' (free to play, better if you pay), that argument doesn't hold for BFH (they obviously need people to pay to make the same $50/person). It does hold true for MW2, though, at $60 with only Infinity Ward-provided matchmaking.
What right does an access provider have to block legal access by their customers. By what argument are their customers *not* being deprived of they kind of access for which they are paying? This is as much a question of user perception as local legal technicalities, but it sounds like Optus has been thinking in terms of the latter.
Seems like a good example of why net neutrality regulations need to extend to mobile developers. "Oh, you can download applications, but if you spend money on them we want a cut". Sorry buddy, I'm already paying you for service, deal with it.
This is key, really on the PC the best option would've been to include an XBox live style setup so you can select a player as a player you wish to avoid in future. What happens then is when you start matchmaking it wont matchmake you with these players. If people cheat they will soon find a lack of people playing with them. If the feedback is sent to IW, then it'd be a good indicator for who to check for cheating to give account bans too as well, if someone has 500 players blacklisting them then it'd suggest there's probably something there to check out.
XBox Live ratings (avoid/prefer) do not affect ranked matchmaking (to prevent people from just avoiding the better players). This is also ranked matchmaking, so I doubt they would let you avoid. The avoid is meant for annoying players, rather than those who should get banned.
However, there is the option to report those who are cheating or otherwise breaking the terms of service. That's the way players get identified for bans.
Infinity Ward isn't running any servers. They may be running matchmaker servers (or perhaps Steam is providing that part of the service too) but not the actual systems the game is hosted on.
So there's not really any way for Infinity Ward to swiftly deal with cheaters in the game. The only way cheaters will be swiftly dealt with on listen servers is via player kick votes.
And how players themselves will manage to keep cheaters permanently out of their games until a VAC ban kicks in, well I don't know if that's even possible in a practical way. So I'd fully expect that even if a cheater gets kicked out of a game he'll just hop into another one, and I also expect you might run into him in other games until such time as the VAC banhammer hits him.
Infinity Ward's removal of cheaters from games will be limited to cheaters detected and banned via VAC2.
That's what I meant to say. IW says who gets to play, and they're the only ones who can. A private group of players can no longer create a clean community and ban cheaters, griefers, bigots, and other undesirables.
I was under the impression that players themselves were limited as to how much they could do against cheaters. I thought there was no vote kick (though I don't have the game to check) because otherwise players would vote kick players better than themselves. But yes, there's still a lag, and any new cheater in your server will cause nothing but problems until they decide to leave.
But Punkbuster has its own issues. Many players were not able to play on Punkbuster-enabled servers in CoD4 because some driver or other bit of code caused an incompatibility.
Really, any anti-cheat will eventually be defeatable. The bigger issue is that since IW is running all the servers you have to depend on them to remove any cheaters, rather than being able to play on a server with a good team of admins keeping them away. It's possible IW will do an even better job of this, but I think it's that choice that people want.
The ice part is water ice. You need a supply of water.
Read it again.
Aluminum is plentiful anywhere we intend to go.
The most likely reason we want to go somewhere long enough term to consider creating new rocket fuel on location will need water (or copious oxygen, hydrogen, and energy) already to support long-term human inhabitants. So, obviously, the limiting factor is just Aluminum, which is also plentiful.
I don't give a rat's arse about this or that game, and I'm a little annoyed about the idea of tax payer's money being wasted on non-crimes such as this.
Better to prosecute them for a crime that doesn't concern you before they move onto crimes that do target you. Stop them while they're still phishing Runescape accounts, instead of e-mails, bank accounts, or credit cards.
I'm sure you will appreciate that taxpayer money is used to pursue criminal charges when someone steals your [insert thing that nobody else but you cases about here].
What makes you think that every sailor aboard the ship would have access to the weapons at all times?
What makes you think a foreign country will care? It's still a group of foreigners with weapons which may or may not be legal to posess in the country. If you're lucky, the officials might take a bribe to look the other way, but imagine in the UK if a docked ship had a stash of weapons. I doubt they would just assume the best and let them on their merry way.
However I find it funny that Scientology has such specific figures, especially on the phone calls.
If you plan to take legal action for harassment, it behooves you to document that all.
As another poster mentioned, though, it's quite likely that NG came back and said here's a system that will do that, and it will cost X, and the customer got sticker shock and decided to drop a few 9s from the SLA. I'm in that business, and this happens all the time.
That sounds about right, expecially after reading this quote:
George F. Coulter took over as the state's chief information officer in August.
"The first thing I noticed was that the network that Northrop Grumman rolled out didn't have redundancy, backup," Coulter said yesterday. "The contract does not call for redundancy in carriers . . . in the network.
"Why that wasn't put into the network, I don't know," Coulter said. "This is a service we have to have."
My guess is that the VA employees overseeing the bidding and proposal writeup did not understand the importance. They probably wanted somewhere to cut costs, saw the word 'redundant', and thought that would be a good place to save money. Without someone technical with enough weight to tell the higher-ups that this is a necessity, some manager will decide to kill that part of the proposal, thinking they saved the state millions. Presuming the last CIO and his team didn't know what they were doing (likely because the person who appointed them didn't know how to tell), this seems believeable to me.
Exactly, I don't see 'some retailers will quote you a higher price', I only see 'one retailers quoted a higher price, and it was fixed after it was noticed'.
I won't rule out that others are doing this, but I'm going to need a few more examples before I think of this as anything more than an isolated incident.
Living in the area, I can tell you VA has definitely been having budget issues. It's also an election year, and the only thing voters wanted their money spent on is roads (one NPR call-in show took about 10 calls for an official, all about the road budget). Put 2 and 2 together, and there's no room in the budget for 'fluff' like a redundant network.
Because Orcus hasn't been recognized by the IAU yet. Sedna and Vesta, as well.
I see. And if you unmod your hardware, will it let you back on? Didn't think so.
That would be another unauthorized modification, which is against the TOS ;-) Of course, the console can't connect to XBL, meaning Microsoft can't turn your box back on anyway.
I don't understand an analogy where XBox -> being alive. Perhaps better is that MS sold you a car and licensed the radio and guages under a TOS. If you violate those terms, they remove your access to these parts. You can still drive the car, though the best part of the functionality might be missing.
Being paid a reasonable wage for a reasonable amount of work is one thing, being paid huge amounts of money for work you haven't even done recently is quite another.
Software companies make millions off the hard work of their programmers, and they don't get an ongoing percentage of sales. If that programmer leaves, they stop getting anything at all but the company continues to make millions from the work they did.
Congratulations, that's the difference between being an entrepenour/business owner/actor/recording artist and a salaried or hourly laborer. The first group takes the lions share of the risk of failure in exchange for recurring profits from sales. The second group takes minimal risk with a guarantee of money paid for services rendered, regardless of future results.
You don't get celebrity programmers for the same reason you don't get celebrity brick layers. Instead you get celebrity software designers (Will Wright, Tim Shaffer) or architects (Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry). While a skilled laborer can ruin a project if they don't perform well, only the designer can make a project succeed. It doesn't matter haw straight the brickwork is or how fast the GUI operates: if the building/program is designed like shit, nobody cares.
The problem is that you need 1.6 acts per week to get that and that it takes more then 20 hours of practice to be performance ready. You're also not counting equipment which is per person A$1500 for a cheap performance grade guitar and A$1000 for a cheap performance grade amplifier.
And guitarists can get by relatively cheap. Bassists have instruments that are roughly as expensive, though their amps cost more, and strings considerably more so ($10-15 for 6 guitar strings, $30-40 for 4 bass strings) which are usually replaced before every performance. Drummers get it even worse, they might manage to get by with $3000 worth of drums.
The point I was trying to make is that the people who play local gigs and teach music locally do it because they love to do it (much like OSS dev's) but the music industry only attracts those who want money, not the love of music. OK a bit OTT but tell me it's not true.
Actually, many 'recording artists' love making music, and a record label is usually the only way they can manage to do music full time. I'm willing to bet you that >95% of major recording artists started for the love of what they were doing and just wanted to get their music heard. Once they got their first big check, though, they were addicted to big money.
If they just wanted money, they probably would have looked into something less demanding than music. Just like your average corporate programmer likes writing code, they wanted a way to make a living doing it. It's not that they don't like what they do, only that working for a business is the easiest (and most secure) way to earn a living.
Pluto is a planet, it's just one of 5 dwarf planets. So yes, to be completely accurate, they'd either need to ditch Pluto or add Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.
All that said, I'm guessing 'ET' woouldn't give two shits about the dwarf planets. He'd see the gas giants, and maybe our 4 inner planets. If they looked really close, they might see some assorted rocky and icy belts, but nothing worth mentioning compared to the other planets.
Of course, part of the idea of dwarf planets is to make them open ended, so you don't need to memorize all of them. The analogy is to mountains: there are lots of mountains, people don't memorize them all, but they're still given special recognition.
Unless, of course, there are non-serviceable parts that are degrading. In other words, verifying that our weapons are able to be fixed for the forseeable future.
For example, if the fissile material or shape charges degrade, you're not going to go about replacing them. You'd just buld new ones, and in that case might as well design a better one from scratch.
Perhaps. But the kicker here is that the Xbox 360 is unable to be used on any other network. Microsoft has taken key steps to ensure that 360s cannot be used over VPNs or any other network other than a local LAN. Individual 360s pass encrypted keys to one another upon first connection and if they do not receive an appropriate replay in 30ms, a connection is not made. It was a blatant attempt to disable alternative services like Xlink Kai and completely lock down online play on the console.
We are dealing with a Walled Garden here. Microsoft is exerting complete control over 360 consoles regardless of who owns them. If it were possible to connect to VPNs like Xlink Kai or others, this ban would be a problem. But it's not. Microsoft sold these guys a console which they said could be used to play online games, and now these console can't be used to so much as send a private message.
Isn't that kind of the point? You buy into the entire system, both their hardware and their network are linked. If you don't like it, nobody's forcing you to enter their walled garden. The Xbox isn't a monopoly (where this argument might hold water), play your games on PC or a different console.
>>>They booted you off THEIR NETWORK.
And failed to refund upto 2 years of Xbox Live subscription, or refund dollars for games that no longer work without the online connection.
As a clarification, they did not boot you off of Live, they booted the console off of Live. You still have a subscription, your modified hardware just can't use it. Your subscription will still work on a legitimate device.
Even people who are just trying to use it to run some basic necessities.
Why does the final use of the power matter when charging for it? The power plant and grid are use agnostic. A KWH is a KWH and is just as expensive to deliver whether it powers a massage chair or a insulin pump.
I do support tiered usage -- first 500KWH for the month at one rate, the rest at a higher rate but that doesn't really correlate with usage. I use the median amount of power for my area but a huge proportion goes to technological gizmos and very little to necessities.
The state has a vested interest in ensuring that those on tight budgets needing electricity for basics are notpaying a premium due to excessive luxury use. The power company doesn't care, but that's why we have a government to step in on occasion. Obviously tiered systems are the simpler (and more direct) method of fixing this, rather than doing hunt-and-peck to reduce individual power-hungry devices. Not only does this allow low-use customers to afford electricity while still providing the same overall profit margin, with the added benefit of being a motivation to reduce energy usage for the bigger consumers (and therefor reduce the rolling blackout issue).
Of course, this is a much larger issue in places like Michigan, where cutting off someone's power can kill them (and yes, he was preparing to pay his bill). So yes, the government probably should think it matters what the power is used for.
Obviously I was somewhat misinformed. I would still say there is plenty of blame to go around, rather than the typical easy route of 'blame the federal government'. Every level of government broke down a bit here.
That said, please mod my GP post down, as what I said is obviously not accurate.